Reports The Washington Post:
"Yet if the choice in the U.S. elections comes down to Bush the unilateralist vs. Kerry the alliance builder, Russia will still take the unilateralist. President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly made his preference clear in recent months. Even though he too opposed the invasion of Iraq, Putin last summer insisted that Democrats had no right to criticize President Bush, since the Clinton administration had done essentially the same in Yugoslavia. When Democrats bashed Bush for exaggerating Iraqi connections to terrorism, Putin volunteered that Russian intelligence had warned Washington that Saddam Hussein was planning terrorist attacks against the United States.
"And just last week, as if reading from the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site, Putin declared that terrorists in Iraq were rooting for John F. Kerry. "The goal of international terrorism is to prevent the election of President Bush to a second term," Putin told a news conference in Tajikistan."